“Stuff of Canadian legend”: locals and expats react to the new Dubai Tim Hortons

We’re pretty sure that Tim Hortons brass were excited to set up shop in Dubai last weekend, but going by initial reports, that’s nothing compared to the joy of expats who’ve discovered a tiny oasis of Canadiana away from home. Sure, we’re used to getting our fix at any of three locations within spitting distance, but Canadians living in the Middle East have had to live Timbit-free since leaving home. We decided to poke around the Emirati blogosphere to see how locals and blissfully re-caffeinated Canucks have taken the big news.

• Writer James O’Hearn rushed to be the first Tim Hortons customer in the United Arab Emirates, and was thus the first to discover some minor differences from homegrown Timmy’s: larger, American-size cups, no “everything” bagels (importing poppy seeds is apparently very, very illegal) and a distinct lack of a drive-through lane. “Yet for all the differences I saw,” he writes, “it still felt like home.”

• Roula and Samer, the former Torontonians behind 2 Foodies in Dubai,were appalled to see macaroni and cheese on the menu (something that’s on U.S. menus as well), but the rest was “a Canadian taste extravaganza.” Sampling just about everything, they were overjoyed to find that the bagels tasted like bagels, “like they do at every Tim Hortons in Canada and not like someone took standard bread dough and rolled it into a circle.”

• Sangeeta Reghu Nair of Sangry Words had never tried Tim Hortons before, but knew from Canuck friends that the coffee and Timbits are “stuff of Canadian legend.” The company’s plan to undercut the competition may be working; after marvelling at the price of the coffee, she writes, “I hate to admit but I need to say to all my Canadian friends that I sort of now understand their love for Tim Hortons. I feel half-Canadian this evening!”

• A defender of the faith delivered three boxes of Timmys to Ann Marie McQueen, the presumably doughnut-deprived author of A Canadian in Abu Dhabi. “Like a long-distance delivery of pure love,” she writes. “I am not going to lie—the sight of that logo choked me up a little.”

• A Waterloo lecturer teaching at the university’s Dubai campus (yes, there’s a Dubai campus) made friends with a pair of fellow Canadians over an Ice Capp. She noted, “That just doesn’t happen at a Tim Hortons in Canada.”

• The Dubai location prompted plenty of activity on Twitter. While most Canadians maxed out their 140 characters on exclamation marks, locals wondered what all the fuss was about, and one cynic even called it “one of those stories that alien intelligence agencies on a faraway planet read and think man, humans are weird.” And of course, it’s all over Foursquare.